Final Cut Express 4 --uhmmm?

Hey all, i'm a young film maker who will start making small, promotional/inspirational videos for my church and also school related projects and was thinking about getting Final Cut Express 4. I think it's at a great price for what it's described to be able to do, but i started doing my homework on it and people were criticizing it for not being able to use your iTunes music like you can in iMovie(which is kind of a big deal for me), and also for being worse than the last version of FCE4 as far as LiveType.

My question: What are your experiences with FCE4 and how would you think it would suit my needs? or should i just stick with iMovie?

i'm a young film maker who will start making small, promotional/inspirational videos for my church ... people were criticizing it for not being able to use your iTunes music like you can in iMovie(which is kind of a big deal for me)

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If you are an aspiring video maker (I assume you're not shooting on film), then you'll need to start doing your homework and learn about copyright law and the restrictions on using copyright owned/protected material (including music and images) in your work. The reason you cannot directly use music purchased from the iTunes Music Store in your work is because in order for Apple to make them available to you in the first place, they had to agree to use DRM (digital rights management) metadata embedded in the files to help fight copyright infringement/piracy. Neither FCE or FCP allows the use of DRM protected music.

However, if you own the rights to a piece of music, or have proper license to use the music in your video, you can use it in FCE or FCP even if it is part of your iTunes library.

If you are an aspiring video maker (I assume you're not shooting on film), then you'll need to start doing your homework and learn about copyright law and the restrictions on using copyright owned/protected material (including music and images) in your work. The reason you cannot directly use music purchased from the iTunes Music Store in your work is because in order for Apple to make them available to you in the first place, they had to agree to use DRM (digital rights management) metadata embedded in the files to help fight copyright infringement/piracy. Neither FCE or FCP allows the use of DRM protected music.

However, if you own the rights to a piece of music, or have proper license to use the music in your video, you can use it in FCE or FCP even if it is part of your iTunes library.

-DH

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Man DH, don't be a crab. I carry the fair DRM banner just as much as anyone but his question was about whether people like FCE, not about DRM.

Eddie, I would recommend you use FCE if you are finding iMovie limits you beyond annoyance and is impacting your work. The leap to FCE is considerable. I was hoping the latest iMovie would close the gap a little on capability between the two products, but sadly it did not.
FCE is extraordinarily complex for the novice. It's like going from MS Paint to Photoshop. That is to say, it's not going to be hard to figure out what to do if you are dedicated, READ ALOT, and commit the time experiment.

Knowing what the "right" thing to do for a problem you have is the hardest part of FCE. Final Cut is a swiss army knife... you *can* cut through a board with the knife blade, but you're better off using the saw blade. It's all *in* there, you just need to learn each tool very well and then later you'll see why it's useful. As a hobbyist, I have been using FCE for going on 5 years now and I know for certain I don't use 50% of its features, or if I do, I may not be using it correctly.

P.S. There are solutions to your itunes problem, some clearly legal, some grey... keep searching.

if you cant use your music from itunes, how do you upload music to you projects? you have to have the "rights" to every song you ever use regardless?

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You can use music that is in your iTunes library as long as it doesn't have any DRM on it. It's not as easy as drag and drop like in iMovie.

The easiest way I've found to do it is find a song that i want to put into a video then right click and select "show in finder", then drag that into the FCE browser
NOTE: Do this if you song is encoded as AAC so it works in the timeline without rendering

if its not AAC then right click the song file and open it in quicktime player, once in quicktime player select file export to AAC then drop that into the FCE browser.

as for the legal aspect, i only make videos for personal use so i pretty sure im not doing anything wrong but if you distribute your videos with copyrighted material to make money, then I'm pretty sure your doing something wrong.

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